120 Beats Per Minute – first look review

The sto­ry of a mar­gin­alised social group fight­ing to extract the means to sur­vive against an indif­fer­ent estab­lish­ment is noth­ing new. Yet what gives Robin Campillo’s 2017 Cannes com­pe­ti­tion entry, 120 Beats Per Minute, a com­pelling heft is its thor­ough­ness. It is a drama­tised slice of social his­to­ry which runs on pro­ce­dur­al details. One of its chief plea­sures is the expe­ri­ence of being a fly-on-the-wall while covert activist oper­a­tions are plot­ted and exe­cut­ed. Less­er films reduce such schemes to cliché and mon­tage. You leave this film know­ing how to make a bath­ful of fake blood, and how best to van­dalise the offices of neg­li­gent phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal companies.

The cen­tral loca­tion is the cosy lec­ture the­atre where the Paris chap­ter of non-vio­lent AIDS activist group, Act Up, have their week­ly meet­ings. Campil­lo plunges us straight into the refined con­flicts tak­ing place with­in the organ­i­sa­tion. Sophie (Adèle Haenel) is sick­ened that a recent stunt led to an unplanned fake blood attack and a tar­get being hand­cuffed. Sean (Nahuel Pérez Bis­ca­yart) is unre­pen­tant. He is aflame with the rad­i­cal ener­gy of one who doesn’t have long to live. Oth­er voic­es chime in, each with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent angle, many exist­ing against the tick­ing clock of a plum­met­ing T4 blood cell count. The direc­tor feeds in trag­ic back­sto­ries with the most dis­creet of touch­es, nev­er wring­ing sen­ti­ment and always push­ing group dynam­ics to the fore.

The film begins as a batch of four new­com­ers are wel­comed into the fold. Nathan (Arnaud Val­ois) is among them. He soon becomes entan­gled with Sean. Their rela­tion­ship is not sep­a­rate to their activism. Sean is, in his words, ​‘poz’, and inti­ma­cies can­not be sep­a­rate to this med­ical fact of life, just as pres­suris­ing Phar­ma com­pa­nies for meds is inte­gral to it.

Campil­lo, in his capac­i­ty as scriptwriter, has a clear-eyed focus that stream­lines all scenes so that each adds a dimen­sion or nuance to life as an HIV-pos­i­tive mem­ber of Act Up. Sex with­out a con­dom is Nathan’s pref­er­ence, but that’s not an option. A bed­room scene – ele­gant­ly com­posed from wide close ups of faces, flesh, and hands caress­ing curves – is the stage for new lovers catch­ing up on who each oth­er has been to date, but even in this pri­vate cocoon, the defin­ing con­ver­sa­tion is about how they, as gay men, have survived.

This is a Seri­ous Movie that engages the intel­lect with com­pelling depic­tions of place, time and peo­ple. The ensem­ble cast is full of small char­ac­ters with per­son­al­i­ties that reveal them­selves through polit­i­cal quirks and relat­ed cre­ativ­i­ty. For exam­ple, a tiny char­ac­ter, Meh­di, comes alive through his chant idea: ​“Mol­e­cules for anal sex fools!” Irrev­er­ent humour isn’t pressed but does crop up as a symp­tom of plac­ing ideals ahead of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. One char­ac­ter wants his ash­es to be thrown at insur­ers. In the wake of this event, a seri­ous busi­ness dis­cus­sion ensues regard­ing what per­cent of the ash­es goes on the insur­ers, and what per­cent­age to his mother.

Death is the unwel­come guest hang­ing over well-run meet­ings and inch­ing its shad­ow across this well-craft­ed film. Mem­ber­ship of Act Up is in con­stant flux because mem­bers are con­stant­ly dying. Ini­tial­ly, Campil­lo han­dles the Reaper’s pres­ence with sto­icism, but even­tu­al­ly gives it time to dance cen­tre stage. While this sec­tion of the film is more con­ven­tion­al than what came before, he embeds a hand­ful of strik­ing images, deeds and lines of dia­logue which leave a lin­ger­ing feel­ing that one has wit­nessed some­thing real and important.